ZeroNet - Just my personal random thoughts about it

Post date: Feb 24, 2017 3:26:47 PM

Link: ZeroNet.io

First I played a bit with ZeroNet and yes, it seems to be practically working. In some cases the response times are even surprisingly low. It's much more responsive than what you would expect from such system. So it works nicely after the initial synchronization.

Some of the opening statements sound really dubious, from practical point of view. Let's not yet condemn them.

Distributed approach, caching, censorship free, incremental updates and Tor support are really nice concepts. Of course the synchronization can be made in very efficient or inefficient way. That remains to be seen.

Easy zero configuration setup is wonderful. I personally dislike programs which require complex setup.

I'm really curious about the SQL database support. But I'll hope I'll find more out about that bit later. Generally data updates have been exactly the problem with distributed systems. It wasn't documented in detail. I guess they're at least trying to do it reasonably efficiently. Yet there are of course spam issues etc, probably. But those are concerns with any site which allows user content.

"No torrent-like, file splitting for big file support" - This is bit confusing. I thought it was using BitTorrent? So why multi peer parallel downloads wouldn't work? Or do they mean downloading 'individual files' from larger bundle? Don't know.

They also mentioned they're not trying to compete with Freenet and I2P and they're not going to replace the current client - server based model. Which are just joyfully sane conclusions.

So nothing much, I'll hope bright future for Zeronet. I've been huge fan of peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies. As well as anonymous & freedom of speech platforms. So, future will tell how Zeronet is going to do. Based on history, it's not going to do well. P2P technology history is pretty bleak. Just like with web sites. Only extremely, really extremely small portion will make any success. Others will be forgotten so that nobody remembers or cares about those after a few years.